How do I provide end users with a copy of their personal data per their request?

Personal data in Helpshift includes all of the Issue details and user information associated with the end user that is stored on Helpshift’s servers. Helpshift provides a set of REST APIs that you can use to automatically create data portability requests per GDPR requirements. Data portability requests are processed on a weekly basis.

To initiate data portability requests, you can use the REST /hs-data API. When setting up the API call, you will be prompted to provide information about the user. Once the request is created, Helpshift will automatically schedule a periodic batch process that will collect the requested data.

You can periodically use the /hs-data/status API to monitor the status of your pending data portability requests. When the request has been completed, you will receive a time-sensitive link to the data in a compressed format.

To provide flexibility, users can be identified via a variety of different methods, as defined in the table below.

User identification

What information is returned?

A user can be identified as follows:

HS User ID: The unique ID used by Helpshift to track a user object that is exposed

OR

External User ID: If your organization has captured a unique user ID using the ‘loginWithIdentifier’ parameter, this ID can be used to identify the user to be redacted

OR

Email: If your organization has set an email address when creating Issues, or uses email support, then email can be used

OR

Issue: A single Issue can be used to identify a user – when an Issue is used, the user that reported the Issue will be redacted along with all other Issues by that same user

The user’s profile information along with a set of Issues created by the user. The Issue info includes the messages, attachments, Custom Issue Fields and more.

Once you have a set of users identified for data portability requests, you can use the following REST APIs to create and monitor these redaction requests. Please see our Getting Started page for our REST APIs to learn more.

PART 1: Creating Data Portability Requests (POST /hs-data)

API: POST /hs-data

The POST /hs-data API can be used to submit a set of data portability requests by passing in the ‘requests’ object in a JSON format as follows:

Parameter

Type

Required?

requests

Array of export requests (see below)

Yes

The requests object contains the following properties:

Property

Type

Required?

Description

property

String

Yes

“user_id” OR “hs_user_id” OR “issue_id” OR “email” to indicate what identity will be provided